Portland's high-stakes school plan will be unveiled Monday night

View full sizeStephanie Yao/The OregonianPortland Public Schools Superintendent Carole Smith, shown here meeting with a student advisory committee in 2007, will unveil her long-awaited plan tonight to reorganize the district's high schools. On Monday night, Portland Superintendent Carole Smith is expected to recommend the most sweeping changes in the history of Oregon's largest school district.

She wants to do something almost no other big-city superintendent has done in recent years -- upend the city's high schools to end racial and income disparities without a judge forcing the district to do so.

Read previous coverage

Read earlier stories about the Portland school district's effort to overhaul high schools.

Smith's main goal is to help reduce the stubbornly high dropout rate -- less than 60 percent of Portland Public Schools' high school students graduate in four years -- and end glaring inequities between the curriculum offered to most of the city's white and middle-class students and its minority and low-income teens.

Her plan would affect students and families in every sector of the city, particularly east of the Willamette River. One or more high schools would close, many schools' attendance boundaries would be redrawn, and the wide-open neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers that have been a 30-year hallmark of Portland high schools could end.

Most big-city school districts have the same sort of disparities Portland does -- big, popular, high-achieving high schools in some parts of town and troubled, heavily poor and minority schools in others.

But Portland stands out on the national landscape because Smith and the Portland School Board are taking action to break up those entrenched disparities, said Candace Crawford, an assistant director at the Education Trust, a nonprofit national group that advocates for low-income and minority students.

Monday night's meeting

The meeting is at 7 p.m. at the Blanchard Education Service Center, 501 N. Dixon St. It will be televised live on Channel 28 (Portland Public Schools public-access channel) and streamed online on the school district’s website. Superintendent Carole Smith is expected to begin her presentation about 8 p.m.

Crawford cautions that individual schools still will have to intentionally work to make sure all students actually get access to the courses that prepare them for college and careers.

Among large U.S. districts, Seattle has done the most to reshape its high schools to make them stronger and more equitable along the lines Portland aspires to. After nearly three years of planning, Seattle this fall will enroll many students mainly by neighborhood, clamping down on transfers that had led to inequities.

In Portland, parents have spent months speculating about the high-stakes details of the superintendent's redesign plan for fall 2011: How many and which neighborhood schools does Smith propose to turn into magnet schools? Which school boundaries does she plan to change and how?

Smith has made it clear that if her proposal is successful, Portland's high schools will become much more uniform in size, curriculum and demographic makeup -- a situation that is already the norm in Beaverton, Hillsboro and Oregon's other large school districts.

It would mark a huge change for Portland, however. The city's neighborhood high schools currently range in size from about 200 to 1,600 and in concentrations of poverty from just 10 percent of students qualified for federally subsidized meals at Lincoln to 71 percent on the Roosevelt campus.

She says her plan will ensure that every neighborhood high school will provide the necessary range of intensive catch-up classes for those who are academically behind; college-level coursework; and robust electives including art, music and career-focused classes. That will raise student engagement and achievement and keep more students in school to graduation, she says.

But many parents fear the changes will tear down strong programs at successful schools, erode neighborhoods where high schools close, prompt middle-class flight to suburbs or private schools, and do little to fix high dropout rates. Critics say, for example, that it's a mistake to force the 1,100 students who live in the Jefferson High zone but transfer to other high schools to attend what has been a chronically low-performing school.

Whether Smith will be able to get the necessary votes to enact that plan, let alone pull it off, is uncertain. Parents, community members and teachers say they're skeptical about the district's promises. Recent district improvement efforts have been rife with missteps.

The recent switch from elementary and middle schools to K-8 schools in about half the district, for example, left teachers and parents saying the district has created a two-tiered system in which only certain kids have access to a full range of classes and other opportunities.

Failure to deliver on high school improvements has been even starker. High-profile efforts to improve graduation rates at Roosevelt and Marshall high schools by creating intimate small academies yielded scant results, despite millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At Jefferson High, after 10 years of purported reforms, at least five reorganization plans and a dozen administrators, the North Portland school has fewer students and academic opportunities than ever.

"The implementation is where this district falls down time and time again," said Rebecca Levison, president of the Portland Association of Teachers. "Part of the reason is that they don't involve enough of us on the ground doing the work."

Smith's plan to remake high schools has been in the making for about two years and has included hundreds of public meetings. But those have focused on the broader outlines, not the details she will unveil at tonight's school board meeting.

The board plans to accept public feedback for about a month, then is likely vote on the proposal June 21. That's way too fast for some parents and community activists.

Eric Fruits, president of the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Association, said the public deserves more opportunity to evaluate the information the district has used to make its recommendations. "The compressed time frame -- whether by accident or design -- has the impact of shutting out neighborhood involvement," said Fruits, the parent of three Laurelhurst K-8 students.

"Thirty days is enough time to make a comment but not sufficient time to make informed comments," Fruits said. "You'll get the impassioned pleas, but I would rather base my conclusion on facts I can look at and critique." -- Kimberly Melton-- Betsy Hammond